Phew … Just in time for Apple’s macOS 10.14 release on the 24th. As this is the compatibility release for 10.14 it was a long time coming. 11 betas of the OS …. hopefully not too much changes when it’s released.

Special thanks go out to the people on our Preview list. In Yate terms, this release dragged on for a long time. At first it was going to be V4.2.1 which eventually became V4.3. There were six preview releases which is a lot for us. Again, thanks for your time, testing and feedback,

There’s a lot of new stuff in this release. Everything is in the release notes which you can always view from the Help menu.

One special note about macOS 10.14 (Mojave). The first time you attempt to do anything with iTunes, you will be prompted to grant permission. If you don’t, all iTunes accesses will fail. The only way to later grant the access rights is by going to System Preferences – Security & Privacy – Privacy – Automation. You then have to unlock the panel and enable iTunes access for Yate.

Yate v4.0 has been released. 224 builds and three different implementations of Custom Fields. It’s amazing how far reaching a single feature change can be in an application.

Thanks again to all our testers on the Preview list who had to put up with ‘less solid’ previews than is typically the case. As always your comments and feedback were invaluable.

A lot of internal changes took place in this release. The dropping of support of OS versions less than 10.9 was merely the tip of the iceberg. We strongly suggest that you Export your preferences as a backup before you update. While we did not have any reports of update issues it’s better to be safe than sorry.

This release also moved the bar on what is the lowest version of Yate supported for importing Yate plist files. The lowest version supported is now v3.10 which was released over two years ago. If you have anything really old that you’ve exported and you have to import it after upgrading, reach out to us. Note that the importing of track metadata still works regardless as to which version was used to export the file.

Loves & Dislikes, changes to the Editing State and various other feature requests have been implemented.

When I was first asked to implement iTunes Loves & Dislikes I quite frankly couldn’t see the need for them. However, at some point I realized that the numerous approaches taken by applications to interpret Ratings, at times makes them almost meaningless. I also realized that setting proper ratings is a lot of work. Quantifying the degree to which you like a recording can be daunting. Looking over my collection, I found that most tracks where I had set ratings, had five stars. So… basically I was implementing Loves via the rating system. Moving on I found a few tracks where I used one star on music I really didn’t appreciate. Again, one star didn’t really describe what I was after. I didn’t “like it a little”….I disliked it.

I wrote a small action, which I ran through the Batch Processor, to automatically set Loves and Dislikes based on five stars or one star. So while I personally don’t use iTunes to view my collection I’ve been sold.

The next release will have changes to make fields which display well graphically, configurable in Yate databases….. where I typically view my collection.

Thanks for the feature requests and especially to those kind people who tested and provided feedback on the release.

Ive been a little lazy with the blog posts as evidently I missed v3.16, v3.15, v3.15 and a slew of v3.14 follow up releases.

As with most releases, 3.16.1 implements a number of feature requests and fixes various outstanding bugs. We hope to keep pushing out the feature requests and bugs, well, there will always be bugs.

Lately we’ve had a number of people reach out to us asking our opinion on the “correct way to tag audio files”. We strongly feel that there is no correct way. Some people are hung up on keeping their metadata exactly the same as that on Discogs or MusicBrainz….. down to spelling mistakes and using the same exact capitalization rules. That’s fine if it’s what you want. Personally we take a far more lax approach. Just remember, that it’s your data. It should look the way you want it to look. Find a workflow that ends up with you having the metadata in a form that makes sense to you. In our opinion, that’s always correct.

A similar question is “What’s the largest cover image I should save?”. I remember spending a long, long time updating my personal collection from 100×100 images to 500×500 images. Then once iTunes started using 600×600 images I went through it again. Well, I personally now store the largest images I can find only typically scaling down if it is larger than 1500×1500. Will I ever regret not going larger than 1500×1500? I’m assuming not but history says I’m wrong.

I first saw Leonard Cohen perform in the early ’70s in Montreal. The last time was in Toronto a few years ago.

If you never saw him perform you cannot begin to comprehend the joy he brought to his shows. He cared about the show and his audience. As a true musician he honoured those who performed with him. Every live show was, at least to me, a night to remember. For the span of a few hours he made you feel as if you were taking part in something.

We’ve actually included everything slated for v3.14 and v3.15 into this release as well as a pile of user feature requests.

This release sees an implementation of the new classical fields which will be supported in the next release of iTunes. iTunes 12.5 is available for testing in the Sierra public beta.

We’ve also incorporated a bunch of Sierra patches. Some of these were internal and some were visual. For some reason those circled characters we used all over the place as indicators look terrible on Sierra.

Some features previously only available through actions have been exposed in the UI. Finder tags and the selective copying of metadata between files to name a few.

The Custom Panel Editor now supports alternate display titles, properties and a new concept called Action Buttons. Actions can now test the modifier key states and can play custom sounds. All this allows for some pretty funky custom UI.

This release took a long time to get out… at least in the Yate universe. There were six previews and various one off builds that were seeded. I can’t begin to express how grateful we are to the many testers who went above and beyond what we expected. Detailed reports on how to reproduce bugs and implementation feedback and advice. Thanks to you all.

v3.12 has been released. A fairly mixed set of functionality this time around.

One thing you may notice is that we’ve attempted to make the MusicBrainz 503 recovery handling better. They are going through server and bandwidth issues which will hopefully get resolved soon. They are working on it folks. Let’s be patient.